Cadman's Trio

Synopsis

On today's date in 1913, at a private home in Denver, this Piano Trio received its premiere performance. The music was by Charles Wakefield Cadman, a successful American composer of art songs who wanted to expand his horizons into chamber music. This trio's first public performance took place a month later in Minneapolis.

While Brahms and Dvořák were most likely Cadman's EUROPEAN models for his Trio, the work's third movement is one of the first attempts to incorporate ragtime rhythms into a chamber work. While remaining true to European classical techniques and traditions throughout his life, Cadman was always trying to infuse his music with an authentically American note.

Cadman was born in 1881, and was in his early teens when newspaper and magazine articles by Antonin Dvořák appeared extolling American composers to consider Negro spirituals and Native American music as source material for their original compositions. In 1907, Cadman became interested in Native American music, and made field recordings of songs by the Omaha tribe of Nebraska for the Smithsonian Institution. In 1909, one of Cadman's art songs, "From the Land of Sky Blue Waters," an "idealized" version of Indian music, became his first big hit, and he even wrote an opera for the Met based on Indian melodies and legends. In addition to art songs, chamber works, and operas, Cadman also was one of Hollywood's early film music composers. He died in Los Angeles in 1946.

Music Played in Today's Program

Charles Wakefield Cadman (1881 – 1946) Piano Trio, Op. 56and From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water

On This Day

Births

• 1899 - American composer William Levi Dawson, in Anniston, Ala.;

• 1920 - Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian, in Yerevan; His Trumpet Concerto, composed in 1950, is his best-known work;

• 1926 - American composer and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, in Hamlet, N.C.;

• 1928 - American pianist and composer Robert Helps, in Passaic, New Jersey;

Deaths

• 1835 - Italian opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, age 33, in Puteaux (near Paris);

• 2006 - British composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, age 84, in Norfolk county, eastern England;

Premieres

• 1777 - Gluck: opera, "Armide," at the Académie Royale in Paris;

• 1913 - Charles Wakefield Cadman: Piano Trio in D, at a private home in Denver; The first public performance took place the following month in Minneapolis;

• 1958 - Stravinsky: "Threni," at San Rocco in Venice, by the North German Radio Orchestra of Hamburg (who had commissioned the work), conducted by the composer;

• 1962 - Copland: "Connotations" for Orchestra, at Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) during the opening season of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein; This concert, televised by CBS, also included the "Gloria" from Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" and the first movement ("Veni, creator spiritus") from Mahler's Symphony No.8;

• 1965 - Diamond: "Elegies" for Flute, English Horn, and Strings, by Murray Panitz (flute), Louis Rosenblatt (English horn), and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting;

• 1990 - James MacMillan: "Sowetan Spring" for winds, at the Glasgow Hospitality Inn by the winds of the Royal Scottish Orchestra, John Paynter conducting.